The Skein of the Archive: Denise Bellon and Remembrance of Things to Come

Janet Harbord

In photographer Denise Bellon's archive, there is an image of a
woman reclining, the top half of her body naked, the bottom half
clothed in what appears to be trousers buckled with a leather belt.
She lies back in the sun, her lips parted, one arm covering her
eyes and the other folded under her head to reveal a soft down of
under-arm hair. At first glance, she could be an icon
of the emerging leisure culture in France between the wars and a
celebration of a liberatory nudism. But look for longer and the
image is not so readily classified. From the sparkling textured
crests that form the background of the photograph, she appears to
be lying not on sand but snow. The contrast of a warm naked body
against cold snow is a key to other contrasts in the image - the
soft skin enclosed by the metal buckles and thick leather of the
belt, the covered face compared with the full exposure of breasts
and torso, a body in repose and yet potent. The photograph is not
simply a woman at leisure in the sun, but a woman eroticised in an
image of conflicting sensual cues.

Denise Bellon worked for the Paris-based Alliance-Photo agency,
a precursor to the Magnum Agency that was created in 1934. The film
begins in 1935 and completes its tale in 1955, covering two decades
critical for world politics. In parallel with military events, the
Surrealist movement gained national presence with an exhibition in
Paris in 1938, and again in 1947. Bellon was friends with the
Surrealists, from Andre Breton to Dalí and Duchamp. This double
lineage of politics and art is the stamp-mark of her work, not as
two separate influences, but as forces always already forged
together. Bellon seems to acknowledge that the terms 'realism' and
'surrealism' imply a separation of what cannot be split apart. So
many of her images perform a coupling of light and dark, playful
and sinister, plain speak and elaborate detail. The surrealists are
there, in the archive, as the subjects of portraits and as
performers in masks. And yet this posturing, which turns the
playful into the troubling, seems almost gauche, an exaggerated
inversion of forms.

In the years between the two world wars of the twentieth
century, Bellon's images speak of a radical inversion. The faces of
soldiers, broken and disfigured by the first war, are turned
towards her camera. These are not masks - there is no deeper truth
but a surface engraved by events. In another image (they are all
untitled and undated), Bellon photographs a model of a flayed
figure, the vulnerable sinews and veins bereft of skin, recalling
James Joyce when he wrote that 'modern man has an epidermis rather
than a soul'. And photographs, perhaps, are a
kind of skin, a surface on which impressions leave their mark, as
well as skein, the surface patterns that coil and loop their
significance.

In 2001, Bellon's daughter Yannick collaborated with Chris
Marker to make the filmRemembrance of Things to
Come. Photographs selected from Bellon's archive are
layered with a soundtrack, a voice that cross-threads the
connections and inferences that appear to lie dormant in images
shot between the wars. A scrap-metal yard bears an uncanny
resemblance to the war wrecked roads of Ypres, amateur parachuters
prefigure military paratroopers to come, and Marcel Duchamp's
unrelenting stare appears to foresee his later misappropriation by
the art world as the voiceover states: 'He wanted to reveal the
vanity of art. One day he'll be used to vindicate the art of
vanity'. Somewhere between haunting prophecy and encrypted script,
the narrator continues, 'each of her photographs shows a past yet
deciphers a future'. And yet - as is often the case in Marker's
films - it isn't clear if there is a distinction between that which
the photographs reveal, and what is retrospectively attributed to
them. The film so eloquently braids a knowledge of the context of
images with interpretation, with the sense of fingering and
handling these objects from the past, that we might ask instead,
what is it that we want with photographs and what is it precisely
that they keep for or from us?

Take for example an image of a bathtub full of film
canisters stacked high, nearly tumbling over the edges. The pipes
from a boiler line the wall behind. The image speaks not only of an
incongruity of placement, but also of a terrible vulnerability in
the suggested relation between heated water and film stock, of
possible ruin and decay. InRemembrance, we
are told that this is the cinématique française, a museum and
archive founded by Henri Langlois, Jean Mitry and Georges Franju,
to preserve rare French films. During World War II, it existed
clandestinely, shipped from home to home, transported in the
disguise of a pram pushed through the streets. The knowledge
delivered by the narrative secures the image with a context and a
meaning, roots it in time, place and purpose. But this knowledge of
context is often not evident with these photographs, despite the
dates and the inferred locations. In the teeming array of images
that Marker's hour-long film presents and moves through at a
varying rate, there are many that remain enigmatic. It is not
simply that their context is not given, but rather that these
images are evidence of a type of intimacy between the photographer
and the photographed - as in the image of a laughing boy seated on
the bare mattress of a metal-framed bed. Something, a negotiation,
an exchange, an assurance, has taken place, but we are external to
it. Marker's skill is to make us feel privy to this knowledge,
tracing visual cues across different images, letting one image
cross-fade into another. And yet, the photographs retain a type of
alterity, a resistance to the filmic trope of narrative and the
culminative devices of editing.

There is an image of two women that Bellon has taken in
the restricted red-light district of Tunisia. The narrator tells us
that this is colonial Africa, offering us another image of a
coloured map of the extensive region of North Africa that was part
of the French Empire, and states that these two women were
prostitutes servicing French soldiers. Bellon 'returns the beauty
of soldiers' whores', the voice says. The two women are looking at
the camera, one is half-smiling, leaning back in a posture that
emphasises her breasts and belly. The other, her hair stylishly
rolled up and lips coated in colour, seems to look through the
camera at Bellon. The look is unreadable, it could be defiant or
proud, or perhaps the closed mouth suggests a purposefully mute
expression? The photograph raises more questions than it answers in
its status as a record. How did Bellon, operating in 1936 as a
female photographer, enter a restricted district of colonial
Tunisia, and negotiate this photograph? What are the cross-currents
of eroticism in display as these two women arrange their bodies for
her camera? The image, like many in Bellon's archive, evidences a
type of intimacy that remains a secret. Here is another image from
Africa, another body set in relation to Bellon's camera. The back
of a child's head, shaved but for a small plait that hangs
asymmetrically from the crown, a body turned purposefully to
display the adornment, or a child caught off-guard? The photograph
discloses so much, and no more. This, it seems, is our relation to
the past: we have evidence of an event, but we remain outside of
it.

The Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser, writing in the 1980s,
distinguished between historical and post-historical images, and,
perhaps surprisingly, the photograph belongs to the latter
category. For Flusser, historical images are those that have been
used to illustrate written texts, that are drawn into the linearity
of the written word, but which oppose writing's chronological
sequence with magical consciousness. In a description that seems to
predict the ubiquity of photographic images in the decades to come,
he says 'photographs are dams placed in the stream of history,
jamming historical happenings'.2Photographs,
for Flusser, retain an agency that resists temporal mores, and
despite the careful concern ofRemembrance of Things to
Cometo place these images in 'their' historical
context, they also float free of its confines. For there is a
double movement at work in the film, which, on the one hand,
proffers photographs as a record, a documentation of what has
occurred in front of the lens: here is an event, a singularity
located in time and place. On the other, these are images gathered
and threaded together anew, subsequently framed, doubled up as
superimpositions, and brought to life by a story from the
present.

The forcefulness of Bellon's work is that it offers us
both of these things, a record and a post-historical
reinterpretation, realism and surrealism. Faced with these images
of fact and enigma, one irrupting inside of the other, we enter the
space of alterity and fill it with our own stories. we double this.
The image of the woman that seems to me so sexually potent, lying
half-clothed, half-exposed to the snow, appears in the film
stripped of this power. The image is cropped so that the lower part
of the body, the belt and clothing, do not appear.3Here, she is part of a sequence of nudist sunbathers
celebrating the body after the humiliations of World War I, a
narration that re-writes the more complex sexual nuances of the
image. But each telling will do what it will with photographic
images, which includes selective 'forgetting' of its parts or its
chronology. Remembering and recording speak the necessity,
conversely, of forgetting and remaking, which recalls Nietzsche's
comment that 'there could be no hope, no future, without
forgetting'.4

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